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customer service in your supply chain that's the topic for this week a vital thing to understand the dynamics of it and what it does to the costs in your business and i'm going to show you an eight-step process that i use with our consulting clients to develop and check customer service policies coming right up [Music] so your customer service and your organization your business is vital to understand and the dynamics of it and the impact it has on your customers and on your organization so let me step through a very simple eight-step process that you can use yourself that i've been using with our consulting clients for probably 30 years and you know why am i talking about this topic and it's very closely linked to cost to serve as you'll see in a moment i talk about this topic a lot because a lot of organizations still get it wrong and in the hundreds if not thousands of businesses that i've worked with over the last 30 years i would say almost without doubt there there is not a single one of those organizations that wasn't either over servicing or under servicing a proportion of their customers and why is that an issue well you're probably going to upset your customers particularly if you're under servicing you're probably going to be driving excess costs into your business if you're over servicing so it is a really important thing to understand and get right so here's eight simple steps first of all we've got to understand what our customers want um and as i've said before many many times you might be surprised at the level of customer service that your customers are happy with some sure will want very good very fast service but others might be happy with what you think is actually quite poor service because they're not in a rush to get things so you need to understand that in a lot of detail what i would suggest is that some of your major customers you have a talk to them about the elements of service that they're happy with that they're not happy with and then for most organizations you're going to have hundreds or thousands of customers maybe some sort of survey give them a list of options you know surveys take a little bit of skill in designing so you don't want to be kind of forcing the answer on them you you really want customers you know giving you their feedback their objective feedback so give a range of options maybe things like if you wanted really quick service like within a couple of hours would you pay extra for that these sorts of things and you'll get a really good insight into what they value and what they really want so step two is to do that inside your organization and you need to be checking things like your organizational goals are you are you price led are you service led you know where is the organization heading what is cus where does customer service fit into that what do key individuals around the organization believe service offers should be and again depending on the size and scope of the organization you might do that through surveys and then step three is very simple you bring those together the customer expectation and the organizational expectation and see where they match they won't always match and you you need to then start segmenting different types of service offers i mean there's very few organizations today that would have a single service offer for all of their customers they segment their customers and products and might have two or three different service offers so step four is really to establish those cost and service impacts of those different segmented service offers what can we afford to offer basically so you might have a rapid service here for particular types of products or customers and there's a little bit of an extra charge there might be a standard free service for example there could be a discounted service where they're happy to wait for a week or two weeks for the product you know whatever that might be so you see how the service offer and the cost to serve are really coming in very closely together and we need to segment to make sure that we're getting the right service and cost appropriate to your customers and your products step five then is to develop that service policy and it's going to have elements got to be really clear to everybody who's looking at it but it's going to have elements about order lead times if you order by here this is when you're going to get your product it'll have things like minimum order quantities so for example if you order over 200 worth of product you'll get free delivery but under that it'll cost this we've all seen that when we order things online those are all the sort of things that need to be very clearly articulated in your customer service policy number six very important we now communicate it to our customers so a nice simple to understand policy this is how you're going to order this is when you're going to get free delivery this is when you might have to pay you know all your minimum water quantities all those kinds of things very clearly communicated to all customers and of course different customers you know depending on their size and their annual buy quantities and things like that might have slightly different service policies then step seven we communicate it to the business very important element particularly for sales staff for customer service staff so that they understand very clearly what the organization is offering customers and i have seen this go dramatically wrong and let me illustrate in step eight at the final step how it can go wrong because step eight is managing that policy we can't just communicate the policy and then expect it to work customers will find ways of making it work in their favor you know we're all human and i have seen in so many organizations where customers really sort of try their luck at times in one organization for example customers very quickly learned that if they complained about a late delivery or you know an item missing from the delivery the customer service staff would waive the delivery charge and so what do you think happened you're training your customers to behave in a certain way so it's really important that your customer service policy is is maintained with a degree of discipline and enforcement if i could use that you know here are the rules and we obey the rules and we don't let people sort of get away with breaking the rules because then it just becomes very unruly so it's really important that that element to actually manage the customer service policy so it helps if it's very clearly articulated to all your customers all the people in the business and that your customer service staff are given the authority to actually manage that policy as it is laid down so there we go eight very simple steps we'll put those up on the screen uh eight very simple steps to help you realign or develop your customer service policy why is it important because if it's wrong if you've got gaps in this policy if it's misunderstood you are going to end up with unhappy customers who can potentially go elsewhere and you're going to have access cost excess cost in your supply chain without a doubt so there we go sim fi it's too early in the morning isn't it eight simple steps to develop your customer service policy uh love to hear your comments down below as always have you had issues developing customer service policies maybe you've got some interesting stories around customer service policies and if you're new to the channel of course do hit subscribe and thank you for watching we'll see you next week bye for now [Music] you